Sección longitudinal / Longitudinal section
Planta primera / First floor
El yeso y la radial… ¿Y cómo hacemos esto? ¿Cómo lo dibujamos? ¿Cómo lo ejecutamos?... Y los cortes ¿quedarán bien? Pues mucho mucho tiempo en modelos 3D hasta perforar como lo planificaría un cirujano. Este cono irá desde la puerta atravesando toda la casa hasta salir por la ventana… Después, unas plantillas y a dibujar las elipses y circunferencias en las paredes con cuerda y lápiz, como lo han hecho los canteros desde hace siglos. Y aparece un contratista, Héctor, raramente entusiasta, y unos albañiles experimentados, George y Sasha, cuidadosos, perfeccionistas, con ganas, pero despistados sobre cómo proceder. Y probamos... Por acercamientos sucesivos vimos que una radial, la gran aliada ibérica, con un disco pequeño y unas manos eslavas, podía hacerlo sin problemas; era cuestión de tiempo y maña… «Pero un momento… -decía Sasha-. Estos agujeros no los podemos dejar así, en el aire; cuando cortemos las grandes elipses, el tabique de panderete se caerá». «Que no -dice el arquitecto-. Mira el yeso: este yeso y este tabique ya no los hace nadie en el mundo… Este tabique puede trabajar a tracción, ese milagro mediterráneo desconocido por el norte de Europa, converso del cemento…». Que se cae…, que no se cae…, que pongo un puntal…, que yo lo quito… Y así fue cómo el arquitecto ibérico amigo del yeso quitó el puntal del habilidoso albañil eslavo… dejando como resultado unos agujeros que abren por sí solos los espacios a la historia de la construcción europea misma.
Hubflat Madrid Gobernador 26
INDOOR/066
The HUB Atmosphere A group of young entrepreneurs got in touch with us with the idea of creating an outlet of the global web THE HUB in Madrid: a network of coworking spaces for social entrepreneurs, where a multitude of projects are launched with a level of social responsibility that are all trying to “change the world”. They took us to see the venue, an old garage for coaches that connected la estación del Norte with Atocha… We’re left fascinated by the atmosphere, a venue that has been in-tact since the 40s, a miracle - a bubble of space in the most clogged-up part of Madrid’s centre. To Not Design? Will we be able to not change the atmosphere of this space? Will we be able to do without doing? Can we not design? Can we introduce a habitable invisible layer? Can we intervene in an unnoticeable way and position ourselves in its history and nothing more? Invisible Operations ...What happens if we only isolate the cover and we add a glowing floor underneath huge wooden boards, warm in winter and cool in summer; if we don’t paint the walls, just line the walls of the meeting rooms with recycled woollen felt and we leave the patina as it is, its broken signs, its defects... What happens if we buy hardly anything new, if we get the members of the HUB to donate their used furniture, if we add other ‘retired’ furniture to give it a new life…
Even so, something was missing that both furnished and were a wildcard, something that served every purpose… and we thought about fruit boxes that could also be stools and supports, they could help to form a staircase, a bookshelf, some desks… And what happens if we plant an orange tree in the old oil-changing pit… Atmospheric Restoration Well what happens is that this attitude of restoring an atmosphere and not the construction itself became a sensorial lever that has propelled the HUB into becoming an important focus of social, cultural and economical activity in Madrid. The HUBflat Dying of Success Sometimes you can die of success, and at the HUB in Madrid this was happening… Its main function, i.e. to be a co-working space for social entrepreneurs, started to get seriously compromised by the success it generated from organizing events, being that combining both worlds became increasingly complicated. It was decided, then, to amplify the space with an empty, unfurnished flat in the same building, right above the HUB, and so appeared HUBflat: a compliment, a support, another concentrated bubble to defend and maintain the essence of the entrepreneurial community. And, like the original HUB, the new space we found hadn’t been altered since the 40s either. Love at first sight, again, and again, that unwillingness to change anything.
Subtraction An intact flat, with tremendous character, a central hallway with rooms to each side, a perfect distribution that serves for everything…, but very walled-in, far too much so to be a coworking space. How to reform the space without damaging the atmosphere, that domestic scale, that intimate sensation of a Madrid destroyed by dammed ‘design’? Well once again touching without touching, touching without adding… But how? And if we remove instead of add? What do we remove? Do we remove the visual disruption, keeping the physical disruption, a visual demolition, strategic subtraction using a cone and two spheres acting as two destructive figures for enjoyment and eye-play… The eye? The eye The eye you see is not The eye because you see it But because the eye sees you Antonio Machado The eye is the instrument, the intermediary of our perception; the eye interprets, re-reads, uses memory sometimes wanting to see what it has already seen… That’s why we can play with it, and we wanted to with HUBflat: getting a space that submits the eye to trickery, to asking itself if that’s a hole or a mirror, if what it sees is a ricochet or something beyond, to asking itself what would happen if I moved and everything is re-composed and disfigured; an altered, broken space, a play space full of surprises, unexpected apparitions, visual sparks and altered perceptions: a space that dares the entrepreneurs to play with it. INDOOR/067
The Gypsum and the Radial And so how do we do this? How do we draw it? How do we execute it? And the cuts… will they turn out well? Well, the answer comes after a very very long time spent with 3D models planned with a surgeon’s precision. This cone will go from the doorway, through the entire house and out through the window… Then on to some templates and to drawing the ellipses and circumferences with a cord and a pencil, as the stonemasons have done for centuries. A contractor appears, Héctor, unusually enthusiastic, and some experimental builders, George and Sasha – both careful and perfectionist, with interest, but at a loss as to how to advance. And we try… with successive attempts we see that the radial saw, that great Iberian ally, with a small disc and the skills of some Slavic hands can do it without any trouble. It was merely a question of time and getting the knack of it… “But wait a minute…” says Sasha, “we can’t leave these holes like this, in the air; when we cut the big ellipses the partition will fall.” “Of course not,” says the architect, “Look at the gypsum, this gypsum and this partition are not made by anybody in the world anymore… This partition can work under traction, this miracle of the Mediterranean world, unknown in northern Europe, those converts to cement...” That it’ll fall, that it won’t fall… Shall I put in a support?... Shall I take it out?... And this was how the Iberian architect, friend of the gypsum, got the skilled Slavic builder to remove the support… leaving, as a result, holes that open to the history of European construction itself.